


there is no 'before'

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Death, Graphic Re-Enactment of Death, M/M, POV Second Person, Poor Respect For Personal Space, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 11:13:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6049479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wonder what will happen to you when he takes the Mustang, if you’ll go with it or merely lay yourself down between the deep-set imprints of the tyres and do the rest of your sleeping in the sun. You’re going to miss it. You think from all the wear on his clothes, his chipped, dirty nails, that he needs it more than you. </p><p>Or, Noah doesn't meet the others until they find Cabeswater and his car, and he hangs around being sad and dead while Adam fixes up the Mustang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is no 'before'

**Author's Note:**

> I asked [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) to send me ideas and she came up with this. She also beta'd it so just five stars for her today. (She _also_ made my [Aglionby Host Club](http://tkscribbles.tumblr.com/post/138851461337/kiiouex-ouran-highschool-host-club-raven-boys) dream come true, I'm going to marry her)
> 
> Title mostly from [here.](http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/128294652371/what-was-sad-ghost-noah-doing-before-he-met)

Most days, you sit by your car. It’s tolerable because there’s only really one day, the same one, a long summer afternoon deep in the woods with cricket calls and birdsong buried in the trees around you. You lay back on the hood under the sun, cool fingers on scalding metal, or you doze in the backseat, or you do the new trick you’ve been practicing; let your eyelids droop until they’re almost touching but not quite, and try to catch the forest growing around you. Sometimes you can pull it off, and you can see the green shooting up and wilting in skipped frames for your slitted vision. Sometimes you just waste hours squinting at the woods, but that’s fine. You don’t have anywhere else to be.

The radio comes on occasionally, and it plays all your favourite songs though it doesn’t get them right. The verses you remember are clear, the ones you don’t are blurry, and as soon as you notice you’ve sung the chorus five times in a row, the tune will quickly peter out and the lights on the dashboard will be as dead as they’ve ever been. Everything feels quieter after, so you shut your eyes and keep them closed until there isn’t enough of you left to feel lonely.

When you re-open them, you’re calm again, the radio still quiet, and that same summer afternoon stretching out before you. There will be more leaves on your windshield, weeds further in their consumption of the tyres, but you’re not about to drive anywhere. It’s fine. You’re fine.

You pass seven years like this.

You know things you shouldn’t. The knowledge is buried in a part of your mind that didn’t used to be there, a part that tracks the time when all you know is that the sun overhead has wavered but never set for you, the part of you that murmurs things in a language you only half-learned, the part of you that is not you but the thing propping you up instead. You don’t know what that part _is_ , just that it caught you and clutched you when you died, and now you are so very slowly trickling out of its grasp, both unable to sustain yourself and too afraid to get it over with.

Your friend used to tell you that you lacked ambition. He didn’t turn out to be much of a friend, but he wasn’t wrong either. You flicker complacently in and out of time, circling the carcass of your car and wishing that the little creatures of the woods weren’t too afraid to approach. The plants don’t mind your presence, but otherwise you think the last living thing near your Mustang was you.

At least the weeds have filled in the trail where your body was dragged away.

It’s an unremarkable stretch of afternoon when your borrowed knowledge seems to stir, warning you of something _alive_ in the area. You can feel people walking through the woods to the east, three of them, moving carefully and carelessly at the same time, alternating treading respectfully and trampling the ground to get to the next thing they want to respect.

You could leave your car to see them. You don’t. You don’t feel real enough to be near people, you think it would hurt more than anything else, and the last time you had company he was standing over you, what if they’re here for the same thing, what if –

Laughter trickles through the trees to you, the loud, boisterous call of boys having fun, and something in your chest eases open. You stretch over the hood of your mustang and follow their passage through the woods, the way they marvel over things you saw seven years ago, and some of their happiness filters through to you. The afternoon feels warmer. You think about sinking into the heat and the joy of the moment, and when you close your eyes, nothing changes. They are still nearby.

One of them splits off from the others, and an absent part of your mind tracks him as his winding path leads him closer to you. It’s not until he crosses the threshold of your little clearing and takes the title of Last Living Thing that you realise you are not alone and sit up to look at him.

A boy about your age – or, the age you were – dressed plain and looking restless in his own skin. He doesn’t look at you. He looks near you, around you, through you, but you are as visible as the air and you feel twice as empty when his attention fixes on your car. There’s something quiet about him, in his eyes and the careful movements of his hands as he shifts some debris off the hood. He’s making a quick, thorough inspection, cataloguing seven years of wear, and it only occurs to you now that you probably could have tended the car yourself if you’d thought to.

His face darkens when he finds the Aglionby decal on the back. You wonder vaguely what his problem is - he can’t possibly think you had enough money to just abandon a car like you were bored of it. You loved your Mustang. You are pretty sure that you loved it, anyway; you’ve spent interminably long beside it and your feelings are as faded as the sticker on the back. ‘Love’ is probably stronger than what you can muster; the memory of fondness more like what you have left.

You watch through the windscreen as he comes back to the front, testing the driver’s side door and finding it open –only now do you really notice that you haven’t been _opening_ the door, just appearing on the inside; how could you not have realised? – and reaches for the keys you left in the ignition. You’re as interested as he is, but your engine doesn’t even stutter when he turns them.

You expect him to leave it there, but instead he goes to the hood, fitting his fingers under the edge, and you slide off just in time for him to flip the front open. He stares into the engine like he understands it, which is more than you ever did, and actually reaches in, starts checking meters and fluids with all the ease practice brings. His focus is total, and his quietness seems lessened with the task in front of him, a chance for him to make use of a skill. There is something intensely elegant about him in your afternoon light, and you find yourself leaning in close to better admire his features.

Very suddenly, his eyes are on yours. He stumbles back a step and stares like he can’t believe it, like you’re a monstrous phantasm and not just a very dead boy. His mouth opens, but all that comes out is a little hiss of disbelief. You just stare, still and soft and harmless, and the worst of his fear leeches out of his shoulders, replaced immediately by apprehension. He is stunningly animated; stunningly alive.

You sense his friends’ approach before he does. When they arrive, you feel yourself dissipate, barely aware you’re doing it but suddenly as substantial as a mote of dust. There’s not much of you left, not enough to see, but you aren’t quite _gone_ like you are when you close your eyes. The boy gapes at the place where you’d been, but his gaze isn’t anchored by you; you are out of his sight, for sure.

For a moment, though. You were very nearly real.

“Adam?” one of his friends calls, the confident one who looks shiny and driven and so gloriously alive. “Oh! You’ve made a discovery.” He circles your car like it’s a monument, quickly recording something about the scene into his phone. It takes a nudge from the third one, the one with the cool tattoo and wicked smile, before he notices his friend is still staring stunned in your general direction.

“Gansey,” he – _Adam_ – says, “I think I saw a ghost.”

Gansey is ever more delighted. “What kind?”

“Just… a boy,” Adam answers, and you tilt your head. For a second you think his gaze catches on you, but he keeps looking around for you and you wonder if maybe you’re not actually more than a trick of light. “About our age. This – it might be his car. There’s an Aglionby sticker on the back, too.”

“And the most rank burger I have ever seen,” the third adds. That hamburger taunts you. But he makes the right guess: “Left in a hurry? Thought he was coming back?”

The three of them consider. “We can certainly research disappearances,” Gansey starts thoughtfully. “No ID in the car?”

The cool one reaches in through the still-open door and flips your glovebox open, rifling through your old CDs. “No ID,” he reports, “But great music.” He actually takes one, and you are too pleased to call it theft.

Adam murmurs something about tampering with crime scenes, like he hadn’t been checking out the engine, and Gansey reprimands ‘Ronan’ far too softly for it to mean anything, and you think your chest is hurting with how much you have missed the living. You didn’t even notice. You thought you were content with the woods. You thought you couldn’t hurt any more but there is a low and desperate ache in your heart for _this_ , for everything you have missed, for your friend before he stopped being your friend and. Life.

Your afternoon sun wobbles towards the horizon, like it’s considering setting. You know it won’t, but the other boys don’t, and they start talking about someone called Helen and how long they have held her up, and then they’re leaving, talking amongst themselves, slipping well out of your reach. Adam glances back, but doesn’t see you, even as you wish he would.

The woods are quiet without them. The circle of death around the Mustang is too hard to inhabit alone.  

You blink. Time passes.

You’re next aware of _being_ about a month later, and there is something so pivotally different about your summer that it takes you a long moment to understand. The air has lost the lazy hull of the afternoon, the sun is where it hasn’t been for seven years, and the shadows are all opposite to where they belong. It’s morning.

This unnaturally natural passage of time unsettles you deeply, because you were so used to the afternoon you’re not sure how you can exist under a morning sun. You saw few enough mornings when you were alive that having to handle them in death seems wretchedly unfair, but you don’t close your eyes to skip it. Instead, you wait to see what could possibly be worth being awake so early for.

You feel his approach in the strange energy that pulses through you in place of blood. Adam looks tired, hauling a heavy toolbox along with him and wheeling a bike awkwardly through the woods. He scans the clearing quickly, as curious as you are to learn your visibility, but apparently you’re not real today. You don’t bother swallowing your disappointment – there’s no one to see it – and resist the immediate urge to banish the bad feeling by just letting yourself cease.

Adam pops the hood of your Mustang immediately, picking up tools like he knows what he’s doing, and you linger nearby, watching him work. It’s something to do.

The morning drifts by, shadows slowly righting themselves to where they’re meant to be. Even in your temperate woods, long disuse in has broken invisible things in your Mustang’s heart. Adam is tinkering industriously with the engine but whatever progress he’s making isn’t enough to heal it immediately.

You wonder what will happen to you when he takes the Mustang. He only brought a bike and a sheen of sweat from cycling, so there’s little wonder that he will take a free, if haunted, car. You wonder if you’ll go with it, or merely lay yourself down between the deep-set imprints the tyres have made and do the rest of your sleeping in the sun. You’re going to miss it. You think from all the wear on his clothes, his chipped, dirty nails, that he needs it more than you.

When the sun finally settles back into place and your summer afternoon is restored, you stretch, having missed the familiar heat and patterns of light around your clearing. Slowly, you begin to feel like you have weight, have a presence, something real returning to you.

Adam notices too. He stares about himself, and seems to find you, though his eyes don’t meet yours. You’re not real enough to be visible, nothing about you he can focus on. You’re not quite there. But you almost are, you’re almost enough to touch him like a breeze.

“Hello?” Adam asks, experimental.

You’re not sure you remember how to speak. But you wave awkwardly, enough to shift the space around you, and his eyes widen at the movement. “Hi,” you try after that, though it doesn’t come across as anything more than a voiceless whisper. The surrounding trees are more articulate than you. Adam still shivers, though you don’t think he really heard.

“Gansey looked you up, you know,” he says very deliberately to the air. If he’s afraid, he’s doing a good job of keeping it hidden. “We haven’t reported your car – we probably should, but… anyway, you’re Noah, right? Noah Czerny?”

You stop, all the heat draining from your summer in a second. Adam rubs his arms for warmth, but you are fixated on the sound of your name from his lips. You haven’t heard it said aloud in so many years, you haven’t been _remembered_ in so many years, and you drift closer to Adam. His eyes flicker over where yours would be, but you’re scarcely more than a shiver in the air. “Say it again,” you breathe.

Your words come out as words this time, curling through the air like smoke. Adam’s fingers clench defensively around his elbows, but he understood. Carefully, correctly, he pronounces your name; “Noah Czerny.”

You sag into the sound, proof that you were alive, proof that you thought had been worn down to a half-eaten burger and an abandoned car. The reminder you had lived makes your memories more clear, the current of energy in your veins giving a little surge in response. You feel yourself solidify a fraction more, and then Adam’s looking into your eyes. Some of what you used to be returns to you, and you give him another weird little wave. “Hi,” you say.

“Hi,” he replies, numbly. You can see on his face that he wishes the others were with him, and that he does not want to have to handle you on his own, and that he’s waiting for you to turn into a nightmare like everything else in the woods has so far.

You don’t transform. You don’t do anything. You ask, “Does my car need much work?” because you’re curious and bored and he seems to know what he’s doing.

The question relaxes him, but again you notice that he’s good at carrying his reservations tucked just out of sight. He starts explaining about your flat rear tyre and continues on to all the other problems that years-long abandonment brings. You think he might be grateful to have something real to latch onto, a problem well within his realm of solving. You nod along for a while, but then you feel the sun in your sky beginning to dip and you shudder, the energy you draw from beginning to sputter out.

Adam notices when your edges begin to drain away. Some comment about a carburettor dies on his tongue, and a nervous edge creeps over him, but this time his concern seems to be more for you than from you. “Are you alright? For a - ghost?”

“I’m okay for a ghost,” you tell him with a lopsided smile. You don’t last much longer than that; whatever’s in you giving out unceremoniously and leaving Adam staring at the air.

You don’t really mean to shut your eyes. You wanted to linger, but you feel too tired to stay awake. Your eyes droop closed, and then Adam’s gone and it’s your afternoon again, more stagnant than summery, and you stare up at the broad blue sky and wonder.

When he comes back, you know only a day has passed, and both his friends are in tow. Gansey looks bright-eyed and ready for amazement, Ronan looks surprisingly tolerant, and Adam looks for you.

You wave.

“There,” Adam says immediately. “It’s the gho- it’s Noah.”

Three pairs of eyes fall on you, and their scrutiny seems to drag you further into visibility rather than ruin it. “A pleasure to meet you, Czerny,” Gansey says, arm twitching like he had to hold back the habit of putting out a hand.

Ronan says, “He’s only a ghost,” which is the most impressive thing you’ve ever heard anyone say, and Gansey treads on his foot like he’s afraid Ronan will offend you. You just laugh, a genuine, delighted sound, and catch Adam staring like you’re something surreal.

They stay all afternoon. Gansey asks you about a hundred questions, and you answer the ones that you feel like answering which isn’t even close to the number that you _know_. Apparently being dead means they will forgive your poor social graces, and Gansey doesn’t seem to mind whenever you drift off while he’s talking. You inevitably move to hover over Adam instead, his hands gently recalibrating the Mustang’s insides but his attention always on you.

You get a little too close, brush up against him, and he shivers a complaint. “You’re so cold,” he says reproachfully, and you are dimly aware of Gansey writing that down in the background, but not as keenly as you watch Adam’s troubled brow.

“Sorry,” you murmur, taking a step back.

He looks almost guilty, but just turns back to his work muttering, “It’s fine.” You think you see a hint of a blush rising in his cheeks, but then Gansey’s approaching with more questions about how you died and you need to go and be interested in what Ronan’s carving into your trees instead.

After that, you’re only really around when he is. You flicker in most weeks, with plenty of skipped ones in between, and he always looks so tired, bags under his eyes speaking to a more productive schedule than you ever lived by. But he carves out the hours to come and tend the car and talk to you, without his friends more often than with them.

He gets better at seeing you, and you get better at being seen by him. He brings along a little radio, ancient to him and only a little dated to you, and sets it down on the grass beside him. It plays songs you haven’t heard before, the sound a little harsher than you’re used to, but you press your ear against the shaky little speakers to hear it better. It has been seven years since you heard a _new_ song, and Adam watches your enthusiasm with a hint of a smile. He offers to leave the radio, but you tell him not to bother; there’s no point mentioning that when he’s gone, you won’t be around to hear it either.

When he finally tosses the hamburger out, you ask him to give it a proper burial and are beyond pleased that he complies, binding two crossed twigs together as a marker. It is the moment when he bows his head in mock prayer for your perished burger that you think all the vague and desolate longing in you solidifies. You want to be alive enough to be his friend, to lurk in the Monmouth he’s always mentioning, to touch him with fingers that don’t phase out if you really try to feel. You want to do all the things you never got a chance to do, and you want to do them with _him_.

He’s delicate for a boy, pretty in a way that must hurt him, must make other people hurt him. Sometimes when he can’t see you, you run your ghostly fingers over the lines of his jaw, press them against his lips. He shivers at the cold, waves a hand through the air of you until you move away. Sometimes he glares about him suspiciously, like he can guess, but he never mentions it. Maybe he doesn’t mind.

You can hope. 

On one of your afternoons, you sense him coming the same second you sense someone else, closer. A shadow falls over you and then you’re on the ground with no transition, agony burrowing _into_ you, and you don’t know what happened just that there is something desperately wrong. The bones in your cheek ache, brittle, begin to crumble under your skin and you can’t get the scream out even though you want to. You scrabble at the dirt under you, hands and feet trying to find purchase as though you can drag yourself away from death. For a second you can see an imprint of veins through your left eye, black and thunderous red against the sky, and then it blinks into blackness. It is beginning to get very hard to breathe.

The shadow’s still over you. You have never been in this much pain in your life and the sheer wrongness of your bones sliding over each other inside you has you terrified. Hot tears prick at your cheek, incomprehension as much as fear, and you’d ask him why and you’d beg him to stop, like he could possibly reconsider, and you make terrible gasping bids for breath that are not enough. Your chest rattles, hideously empty.

You think you hear someone else sob, and pain is shutting down your mind, you feel your head shattering like glass, falling to nothing but frail shards onto the ground. There’s grass under your nails, but whatever your hands were searching for, they never found. Your other eye is giving out, world stuttering away in hazy grey, and then –

You’re on your feet, blinking at Adam and he’s staring at you, eyes wide with horror though you couldn’t guess why. You sense that twenty minutes passed, somewhere, but you’re used to missing time, and you just cock your head as he runs shaky hands through his hair. “Is something the matter?” you ask, confused.

“You,” he starts, and stops, and turns away to draw in a desperate, shuddering breath. “Oh, my god,” he says weakly.

You don’t ask him what got him so flustered. He takes another ten minutes to recover enough to start working, though it’s hours before his hands really steady. For the rest of his day, whenever he looks at you, his eyes are creased with worry, either for him or for you. It’s hard to tell.

You don’t like it, though. You flutter anxiously at his elbow, because you’re used to him quiet but not so hard-edged with silence, and whatever’s wrong you want to make right. By the time the sun is low and ready to leave, he still hasn’t spoken to you, and you feel crippled with misery. “Adam?” you beg eventually, desperately afraid that if he leaves like this he won’t return and you will go back to being alone. You don’t think you’d survive alone anymore.

His eyes are heavy with grief, but you don’t know who for. “Noah,” he says, carefully, and he’s always as gentle with his words for you as his hands are on your car. “You’re not really okay like this, are you?”

You have to consider. “I was,” you say, truthfully, and you feel your edges flicker. It would be trivially easy to let go and avoid the rest of this conversation. But Adam’s watching you so carefully, like he really needs to know, and you want to reply. “I’m not sure I’ll be after. When you and Gansey and Ronan are done here.”

“Are you… trapped here?” he asks.

You tell him truthfully. “I don’t know.”

He thinks about this for a long moment. He already packed up for the day, and it’s getting late. You know how precise his schedule is, but he’s still giving you this long moment of his time, an oddly precious gift. Slowly, expecting resistance, you creep forward and curl your fingers around his empty hand. He stares at the contact, your cold hand over his grease-stained fingers, and he doesn’t pull away. He says, “Maybe you can come with the car. Gansey would probably love to live in a haunted house.”

“If I can leave,” you say.

For the first time, he looks at you and actually asks, “Is it alright? For me to take your car? I’m disrupting your afterlife.”  

You smile at him, a gentle curl of your lips, and you say, “You need it more than me.” Something in his face says _charity_ and frowns, even though he worked for it, even though you haven’t driven it in seven years and it’s probably legally derelict by now. You offer a compromise; “You can give me something in exchange, if you want.”

“Oh?” he says, sounding almost relieved until he considers, “What does a dead boy want?”

You give him your most sheepish expression, and you lean in to press your lips against his. You know you’re cold, and you think you must be unwelcome from the way Adam tenses up against you. It’s an awkward second before he relaxes against you, and it’s still cold and you don’t think either of you are very good kissers, but the feel of him against you more than makes up for it. One of his hands reaches up to cup your broken cheek, and you attempt to make up for poor technique with enthusiasm until your smile is irresistibly broad and you have to stop.

You have never been this real before. Energy and life and memories flood you, and you press your forehead against Adam, giving a little sigh of relief with your returning humanity. You’re grinning hard enough to stretch your mouth, and you couldn’t turn it off if you wanted to.

“Right,” he says, numb and quiet and pleased. He reaches up and rubs his thumb along the dark bruise on your cheek, a little breathless and a little overwhelmed and the most attractive person you’ve ever seen. “So. Uh. When the car works, you’re welcome to come along.”

When he goes, you feel tired in your bones, and they’re half a mile away. You curl up in the Mustang’s backseat and try to think and resist the lure of the nothing that could wrap you up and take all this away. It would be easy to skip the rest. You can sleep until Adam’s gone, until the Mustang’s gone, until the power in you has all bled out and you’re gone too.

You don’t think you’re brave enough to die, and you don’t think you’re brave enough to stay. Without the car, you’d be lonely. Without Adam, you’d be a wraith.

Really, it doesn’t take him that long to fix up the Mustang. ‘The’ Mustang, not yours anymore. He could have done it faster if he hadn’t had to walk so long to get to it, or wasted so much time talking to you. Once the rear tyre is changed and the engine responds to the key’s command, that’s it.

Adam did not bring Gansey or Ronan along, so you cheer for him, clapping along to the engine’s purr. It sounds as good as it used to, and you’re pleased to see it living again, sucking air in through its vents and exhaling hot exhaust. Adam grins at you and wipes his brow, however many stolen hours of hard labour finally paying off, and he loads his bike into the backseat. There’s a conclusiveness to the action that makes your smile fade, and Adam shoots you a nervous glance. “You’re coming?”

“I’m coming,” you whisper, though you’re still not really sure that you can. Adam just nods, either believing you or not about to tell you that he doesn’t, and gets in on the driver’s side. You actually, physically work the handle and slide onto the passenger seat beside him. He handles the clutch with the same care he handles everything, including you, and your Mustang follows his direction obediently.

With no small effort, Adam escapes the deep imprints where the tyres have been sitting and carefully reverses down the path that was overgrown seven years ago and is absolute wilderness now. The sun seems to be falling, the sky darkening, and all the shadows are wrong, familiar canopy replaced by different patterns of leaves overhead. You know it is the smallest of every difference you’re about to embrace, but you watch the shifting scenery with a queasy feeling in your gut.

Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe you should have stayed where you were, without the Mustang. Maybe you shouldn’t have let Adam _take_ the Mustang. He glances sideways at you, sees the way you’re staring out the window like you’re going to flicker away to be back among _your_ trees, and he turns on the radio. The song that starts is a loud, clashing mess of sounds that you’ve never heard before but know you want to hear more of. You settle tentatively back into your seat and eye the thinning woods around you with only the required amount of suspicion.

When a break in the trees opens up ahead, your fingers curl tight around Adam’s arm. He takes one hand off the wheel to hold you back, and something in his eyes mirrors yours. He understands your fear of leaving. He’s taking you anyway. You hold a breath you don’t have as the end of the woods approaches, and release it as you pass, the world opening up around you, vast skies and roads and all the enormity of the world bearing down on you, but not quite enough to crush.

You are out of the woods. Henrietta looms ahead, just as you’d left it, impossibly different. The last of summer vanished when you left the trees, and for the first time in seven years there is a grey sky overhead, brimming with water and change. A drop of water hits the windshield and you blink up at the brooding clouds, wondering if you should miss your summer afternoon.

Adam’s hand squeezes yours, and the warmth of him travels through your fingertips. You close your eyes, and when you re-open them he is still beside you.

**Author's Note:**

> I also have a [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk at me.


End file.
